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In and out of equilibrium

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Abstract

Albert Einstein's work on brownian motion showed how thermal equilibrium could be brought about by work exchanged through thermal fluctuations and viscous dissipation. Glasses are out-of-equilibrium systems in which this exchange happens at widely different timescales simultaneously. Theory then suggests the fascinating possibility that such behaviour may lead to a more general form of thermalization, in which the effective temperature shared by all components differs at each timescale.

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Figure 1: The two-time (t,t′) correlation C(t,t′) of a typical physical quantity in terms of log(t−t′) for two temperatures T1>T2.
Figure 2: M copies of a system (A1, A2,..., AM).
Figure 3: Fluctuation–dissipation plot for a sheared supercooled liquid, taken from ref. 5.

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  1. PMMH Ecole Supérieure de Physique et Chimie Industrielles, 10 rue Vauquelin, Paris, 75231, CEDEX 05, France

    J. Kurchan

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  1. J. Kurchan
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Kurchan, J. In and out of equilibrium. Nature 433, 222–225 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature03278

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